Connectopia: A Modular Board Game Simulating Digital Interfaces to Assist Refugee and Asylum Seeker Integration

Interactive technologies play an increasingly vital role in the integration processes for refugees and asylum seekers, but a lack of familiarity makes their use challenging and stressful. We aimed to create an artefact that could help migrant centres provide better digital-skills education to refugees while using playful and social design elements. Interviews with staff members at UK migrant centres were processed in a thematic analysis, revealing a high demand for help with integration-related digital tasks among refugees. This led to our creation of Connectopia, a two-player, competitive boardgame that uses modular components, an internal microcontroller and multimodal feedback to playfully emulate interfaces such as government portals and email. We created a low-fidelity prototype, which allowed us to perform user testing and a heuristic evaluation. The final design expands on the original by including multimodal feedback (haptic, visual, and auditory) to communicate success or failure at tasks. Connectopia can be expanded to simulate a variety of interfaces and provide playful education in refugee and migrant centres, in both social and structured educational contexts.